Mark Bittman TED Talk: What We Eat

Fred Wilson And Mark Suster Missing Out On AirBnB And Uber

Mark Suster (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

photo of Paul Graham (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Fred Wilson (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Fred Wilson was one of the earliest people Paul Graham reached out to as AirBnB was making its early moves. Wilson said, nah. And here is Mark Suster waxing eloquent on his missing out on Uber.

These are smart guys, well connected. They are VC bloggers I like. What happened? How did they miss out?

They say about companies, you become so good at one thing, you tend to miss out on the next thing.

AirBnB and Uber are alike in that there are physical things in their equations. There are apartments and cars involved. I think they sit on top of a mega trend where software actively interacts with the physical environment. And I feel many more large companies will get created at that intersection.

When you have stellar track records of information only kind of software plays, I guess you don't feel the love for the physical.

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Big Rig

Big Rig

An Optimistic Scenario

The Subatomic

It is misleading to try and take the eye level reality to the subatomic. At the subatomic we enter the boundaries of matter-energy duality. It is not surprising that along those borders particles behave both as matter and energy. It is like melting ice becomes both ice and water. Evaporating water becomes both water and steam. You are on the borderline.

Just like there is no mitochondria at the atomic level, because the mitochondria is a cellular level reality, there are no alternate universes. You can not extrapolate from the subatomic to the eye level reality and say, in another universe I am not drinking coffee right now, because that is another choice I could have made. That alternate universe does not exist. I don't think so.

Just like the naked eye only sees a narrow part of the electromagnetic spectrum, I feel like our current tools only see a narrow spectrum of what is the subatomic reality. And what we can't "see" is dark matter. Just like the speed of light is a limit of sorts. Maybe the dark matter is not only stuff we don't know, don't see, it is maybe unknowable, unseeable. We are boxed into a narrow space. We know you are out there, but we will never know you.